Call Of Duty creators switch on Respawn website

The website of Respawn Entertainment – the company formed by the creators of Call Of Duty and many of the brightest minds from Modern Warfare studio Infinity Ward – have updated their website with the first hint about their new game.

Confirmed: Respawn’s new game will feature a giant octopus and that’s its eye

The implosion at Infinity Ward is one of the most bizarre stories in gaming, but the short version is that two of the creators of Call Of Duty – Vince Zampella and Jason West – were sacked by Activision not long after the release of Modern Warfare 2.

Activision claims they were colluding with Electronic Arts to set-up a new development studio and spirit away staff and company secrets. West and Zampella claim that Activision was trying to do them and the rest of the team out of their royalties. Lawsuits were fired off in both direction and around 40 employees left Infinity Ward to start work at Respawn.

That’s old news though, the question now is: what new game are Respawn working on? You’d have to say that some manner of first person shooter was the obvious guess, but there are no guarantees -especially as up until yesterday evening their website was just a single email link.

Now though the official website is filled with job ads, comments and pictures of Respawn’s offices. Although unsurprisingly there’s no real explanation as to what the new game is. There are, however, the two screenshots you see on this page .

Sauron’s Dark Tower, or an elephant laying on its back?

‘Respawn is developing a multi-platform product based on new video game IP and funded through its publishing deal with Electronic Arts, one of the top publishers in the industry,’ is the only official description of the game.

In fact the only genuinely useful information on the whole website is that Respawn has also hired a few people from Sony’s Santa Monica studio – best known for the God Of War series.

So what are the two pics? The first one looks like maybe it could be some sort of exterior shot, maybe of some sort of tall-chimneyed building? Could the second one maybe be some kind of zoomed in view of a gun? The lettering on it doesn’t provide much help – it appears to be a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, saying either ‘ÐWOD’ or ‘DOMÐ’ depending on which way up you read it. Or it’s just the word ‘DOWN’ with the letters all wonky.

Whatever it is, we’re unlikely to see any kind of official announcement until next year.